So Bad it's Good

We exchanged glances, on the verge of laughter. “Is this really happening?” One of us said, chuckling. We were trying to get from Berat to the riviera city of Sarande in the far south, near the Greek border.

“Surely the whole 60km can't be like this...” I said, after 10km of what was possibly the worst road we had been on so far. “and this is what Google Maps labels as a yellow road.” Dan says. Darkness closed in long ago. The road climbed into the highlands before following a distinct ridge. Its features were quite unique. In a fast section you could go 40km an hour. Other stretches treated you to steep corners of large, sharp rocks. The most dominant style of the road though was sections where one wheel would be on cobblestones and the other on dirt. I think it was an old Roman road, gradually improved over the centuries but receiving little to know maintenance money in modern times.

It had been extended to a reasonable width but other than that I'm not really sure if the surface was any better than what it would have been like five centuries ago.

“God the clearance on this car is horrible!!” One of us would say every couple of minutes as another rock menacingly slammed against the bottom of our car.

“Maybe we should pull over and take a look...” we slowed down from all of about 30km and hour to a complete stop.

Dan saw it first. “Shit!” he exclaimed loudly. The back right tire was completely flat and judging from our experiences with unusually bad clearance had been for at least fifteen minutes. I walked over to take a look.

“Did you throw any water on the brakes again?” I asked, half jokingly given the situation. “No.” Dan said flatly. “What's that hissing sound?”

I knelt down, moving my ear towards the wheel. Air was suddenly blowing softly on my face. It was a completely still night. I cursed.

Air was escaping from the front right tire. Not only did we have one flat but another was on the way. I put my finger over the hole to stop any air escaping until we were ready to continue driving. I could hear Dan rummaging in the back of the car. I had him say something under his breath. “What?!” I inquired.

“Goddam Michael gave us the wrong tool!” he was referring to the Nigerian in the Czech Republic that sold us the car. Perhaps it was the world punishing us for making so many jokes about his emphasis of the need of the big technician paper or his pronunciation of the word “fuel”. “Are you #!?*# serious?!” I retorted in shock. “Yep.” he said with finality. “Check in the passenger door, there's some kind of tool in there.” he did. Also not the right tool. Not only did we have two flat tires but we had nothing capable of changing the one of them that we had a replacement for.

Sometimes things in Albania get so bad that their laughable. They're the kind of things you may joke about happening, making reference to all the stereotypes but never do. But then you go to Albania. Things become real very fast. Feeling very flat and worried we drove on slowly through the darkness, councious that we were doing even more damage.

We found a bend with a driveway. We stopped here and camped the night. Dan slept in the car worried at the sound of some dogs on the hill. I wanted to get a good nights sleep so I put up my tent. I struggled to sleep. Majorly. Next, to make things worse I had a very aggressive dog barking outside my tent that kept me up and on edge well past 2am, giving me more time to think about the predicament in my worn down, paranoid state.

The sun forced me from my tent by 8am. It felt more like 12 but as per normal, it never is. Before we got the chance to walk down the driveway to the house the owner's son turned up on a motorbike. As expected they spoke no English whatsoever. We gestured towards our car and demonstrated the fact that we had no tool. He left and returned half an hour later. No luck.

We sat on the crash pads in the intensity of the midday sun, awaiting a miracle. Hours passed. We flagged down six other motorists that were crazy, or needy enough to need to drive this poor excuse for a road. Around 2pm that miracle came. We saw it from a distance. A fully equipped four wheel drive. As it rounded the bend near our current residence I saw French plates. My heart raced. We flagged them down to discover they were Germans living in France with good English skills.

“Oh wow.” One of them said, literally open mouthed, upon seeing not one, but two flat tires. They produced the correct tool and helped us put on the spare which happened to be as good as the normal tires. Thank god. We were going to need it. We discussed Albanian experiences, joking about the roads, exchanging hospitality stories. My spirits were lifting now that we were getting somewhere.

After an hour or so we said goodbye, promising not to continue and return to Berat to get a new tire and probably wheel. They said if we were ever in there area to give them a call and come visit. If I ever am I will definitely take them up on the offer.

We began driving, the flapping, crinkling sound of the remaining redundant tire a reminder that the ordeal was far from over. After about 200m we saw around ten Albanians men standing on the right of the road, taking a break from tending the fields. They flagged us down, clearly telling us to stop. It was obvious the whole community knew about our predicament. The guy from the farmhouse we spent the night near had ridden around the whole neighbourhood attempting to source a tool.

One of the guys had spent a bit of time in Italy and did most of the talking, perhaps due to perceived common linguistic ground. I played around with vocabulary from various languages, struggling to explaining the most basic of things that couldn't be explained with hand gestures. After 10 odd minutes of deliberation to little gain he said something that I clearly understood to mean “Wait twenty minutes.”

Note the wheel sitting on a rock propping the car up!

We did. In another twenty minutes time and old guy turned up. We had met him before. We flagged him down by the side of the road but he didn't have a tool. In this instance he appeared to be shouting, chastising us and the others for blocking the road.

Homemade Vodka

Then all of a sudden he put some music on, grabbed Dan and began dancing in a joking kind of way. A bottle of colourless home-made liquid was offered around. They started writing numbers on a piece of paper. For what I didn't know. I said two words. “Mas tarde.” Later. I had no idea what we were negotiating over as nothing had happened yet.

First they tried to install the wheel from their car. To no avail. When that didn't work they removed the tire from our car before removing their own. In possibly the most interesting way one could possibly imagine they managed to remove and put on a car tire and seal it professionally with farm tools. I've never been so pleasantly surprised. The process appeared brutal but calculated. They bashed at it. They stood on it. Then did some rural trick with water to ensure it was airtight. And we were on the road. 

We gave them 4000 Leke for their efforts, a hell of a lot of money in Albania but a mere 28 Euros or approximately 42 Australian dollars. I don't think I've ever felt like I did that day. The transition from total despair, to some hope to being entirely in the clear. The backyard repair job from the Albanian highlands is still going strong well over a month later in Spain, over a 2000km drive away. Albania goes to show that the world is still a warm place to be. 

Negotiations